


Implausible Perpetuity

by procrastinatingbookworm



Category: Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (2013)
Genre: (it's canon to me), Asexual Character, Asexual Relationship, Autism Spectrum, Canon Autistic Character, Disability, Disabled Character, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fix-It, Friendship/Love, Happy Ending, Holding Hands, Injury Recovery, Jay Gatsby Lives, Kissing, Love Confessions, M/M, Names, Oral Sex, POV First Person, POV Queer Character, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-28
Updated: 2020-03-01
Packaged: 2021-02-27 22:21:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22933219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/procrastinatingbookworm/pseuds/procrastinatingbookworm
Summary: I saw the mattress, and its terrible burden, I saw the blood swirling in its wake like red ink into water. I think I even saw the wound, dark as a shadow beneath one splayed, pale hand.But I didn’t process it. It wasn’t possible.Gatsby, for all his mystery, for all his solitude, for all his terrible melancholy, was so viscerally alive. To see him floating there, eyes shuttered, fantastically communicative hands limp on his chest...It was anathema. It was unthinkable.
Relationships: Nick Carraway/Jay Gatsby
Comments: 7
Kudos: 93





	1. Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.

I had meant to go to the office. There was a terrible weight on my shoulders—the heaviness of inaction. I felt a need to accomplish something, even if it was only the job I can now say for certain I had even less interest in than Gatsby had in his parties.

I had just stepped off the train car when a sudden horror gripped me. A realization, triggered by the passive musings of a regular commute.

I whirled around before I was out of the car’s doorway, nearly slamming bodily into a woman in a dress the same yellow as Gatsby’s car. Her lips, parted in a sudden cry of shock, were painted scarlet.

Too terrified by what I had potentially allowed to occur to apologize, I took her by the arms, just above the elbow, and turned us, so that she was on the platform, and I was back on the train.

Letting go of her and stepping back, I fell into an unoccupied seat and  _ prayed. _

*

As I was going up the steps of Gatsby’s house, my brow lined with sweat from the rush, I heard the shots. One, then a pause, then another.

The noise barely reached from Gatsby’s back lawn, through the halls of his emptied mansion, but I had been listening for something of the sort.

The butler and I acquired a procession as we tore through the house and out the back gate—cook, gardener, a maid who rushed ahead of us on the path and was swearing in some rough language—Russian, maybe—before the rest of us reached the poolside.

For a long moment, I couldn’t comprehend it.

I saw the mattress, and its terrible burden, I saw the blood swirling in its wake like red ink into water. I think I even saw the wound, dark as a shadow beneath one splayed, pale hand.

But I didn’t process it. It wasn’t possible.

Gatsby, for all his mystery, for all his solitude, for all his terrible melancholy, was so viscerally  _ alive _ . To see him floating there, eyes shuttered, fantastically communicative hands limp on his chest...

It was anathema. It was unthinkable.

I crashed forward into the water. 

Later, the sour-voiced butler told me that I had cried out Gatsby’s name, reaching for him like a desperate lover. Perhaps I was. 

A desperate, jilted lover. Realizing only at the climax that the story wasn’t mine—that I had been nothing but a carrier.

I seized Gatsby’s hands, squeezing them tightly as if I expected a miracle.

I hadn’t expected anything of the kind, and I nearly screamed when Gatsby’s eyes opened.

“Hello, old sport,” he said, dazedly. “I do think I’ve been shot.”

*

The doctor told me, in the stiff, graphic language of one deadened to suffering, that the bullet had gone through Gatsby’s left shoulder. It had splintered two ribs, clipped the joint of his arm, and lodged in his shoulder-blade. 

Removing it without irreparable damage had taken two surgeons five hours. I spent the whole time in the waiting room, hands clasped between my thighs so I wouldn’t chew my nails, shaking violently.

When I was allowed to see Gatsby again, he was sitting up in bed, his face grey against the white sheets, his arm in a sling. 

I sat down, hard on the edge of the bed, fearing my knees would give out.

“Nick,” Gatsby said, and I pressed my fist over my mouth, seized by the urge to shout at him.

For what? What had he done, that I hadn’t done in turn? Hadn’t my idolization of him damned me as much as his adoration of Daisy?

Would I have run down Myrtle Wilson, if I had spoken up in that hotel room, taken Daisy’s place? Would I have stopped the car? Would I be lying dead now? Would Gatsby have worried for me the way I worried for him?

“I didn’t know you cared so much, old sport,” Gatsby half-laughed, watching me struggle to swallow tears.

And wasn’t that the crux of it.

He’d been so caught up in her, in the staggering importance he’d given her, he’d been so  _ stupid— _

I was crying in earnest at that point, and Jay reached out for me. He  _ was _ Jay, then. Not Gatsby. Boyish and strange and unsure, clasping the one hand I hadn’t clamped over my mouth between both of his.

“I’m sorry,” he said, still nearly laughing. “I didn’t mean to—”

Of course he hadn’t meant to. But it happened, nonetheless.

I cried myself out, sitting there on Gatsby’s hospital bed. I was quite embarrassed afterward, but not enough to leave.

In a different time, maybe, I would have crawled under the thin hospital sheets and fallen asleep with my head on Gatsby’s chest.

As it was—as we were—I dozed in the chair beside his bed for the next few days, until the doctor, shaking his head at the miracle of my quick intervention, let us go home.

We went back to Gatsby’s great, empty house. 

The staff, which had dwindled to the sour-mouthed butler, and the foreign-speaking maid, both of whom seemed to have nowhere else to go, and the cook, who I believe took pity on the other two, told us that the house had been a great mess of reporters for a couple of days, but that they had all been turned away. 

For the next week, we fielded calls—both on the wire and to the door, sharing with friends and near-strangers alike what had transpired.

That was to say,  _ I  _ fielded calls. My fortuitous arrival and subsequent proximity had made me somewhat possessive of Gatsby, or at least of this event. 

Gatsby spent nearly the entire time sprawled out on the couch, looking pale in comparison to its rosy hue, but at least no longer ashen.

Of all the visitors, I recognized at least a third, and Gatsby, impressively, could recall the names of more than half.

None of them seemed too horrified at what had happened. Gatsby wasn’t much of a person, to them. He was just a host.

Though he barely moved from the couch, and when he did, shuffled at a wretchedly slow pace, most of his weight on his formerly decorative walking cane, he still made his best effort to be  _ my  _ host.

The first night, he made to usher me out, and I confessed, in a sudden moment of verbosity, that I couldn’t imagine leaving him alone. Not again.

He seemed grateful for my company, at least, though perhaps I was imagining it.

The first night, I fell asleep in an armchair, watching Gatsby struggle not to doze off on the couch, and woke up with a crick in my neck and a blanket draped over me.

Gatsby lay very still and small on the couch, and in the haze of sleep I rose, shaking him in sudden terror.

He jolted awake under my hands, wincing back into the cushions at the jostle to his wounded shoulder.

Abruptly, I was ashamed. I apologized, but he only laughed.

“Lie with me, if it’ll make you feel better,” Gatsby said, perhaps teasing, perhaps not. Either way, I nearly took him up on it, but contented myself with sitting on the floor, leaned up against the couch, with Gatsby’s wrist in my hand, his pulse under my fingertips.

I slept again, with the reassurance of his heartbeat. When I woke, it was with the paradoxical terror of peace.

I could have stayed there forever, with Gatsby’s hand in mine, forever. I would never tire of examining the way his face lay smooth with unconsciousness.

As it happened, we spent most nights that week on the first floor, having decided the stairs up to the hallway of guest bedrooms weren’t worth the pain of climbing them.

Gatsby slept on the couch, and I slept wherever I ended up, once the calls had ceased. In an armchair, or in the narrower sofa in the adjacent room. 

More often than not, I found myself nearer to Gatsby by the morning than I’d been at the beginning of the night.

There was no comfort to be found, sleeping on the floor beside the couch in a pile of linens, but the terror of my mistake continued to draw me back to Gatsby.

On the fourth night, as I was repositioning myself in the armchair, Gatsby lifted his head.

“Make up your mind, old sport,” Gatsby said, irate with tiredness. “If you’d like to be certain I’m alive, come lie with me.”

A jolt went through my stomach. I could have guessed, given the suits, and the fact that he’d left Oxford in a rush.

Daisy could have driven him to New York, even to West Egg, but not out of Oxford. 

“But…” I stammered, thinking of my own college days. “Your shoulder…”

“I have two shoulders, old sport,” Jay said, softly. He was grinning at me, that disarmingly bright, but nearly tenuous smile. Then, softer still: “Come  _ here, _ Nick.”

I went.

The couch was nearly wide enough for us to lie side by side, but Jay coaxed me to lie with my head on his shoulder. His left arm was tucked, in its sling, between our bodies, and his right laid over my back.

He smelled faintly of hospital antiseptic, and perhaps less faintly of sweat, but beneath that, I could smell the sweet scent of his skin.

“Nick,” Jay said, softly. His voice was so quiet that I barely heard him, even in the room’s complete silence. “Might I… I suppose by now I can assume…?”

I kissed him.

Jay’s lips parted, and it took a long moment, but he did kiss me back.

I’d like to say we overcame our personal misgivings and physical limitations and made love there on the couch, but we didn’t. We only kissed, Jay’s hand in my hair and my hand on his jaw, until we were too tired to keep our eyes open.


	2. These, our bodies, possessed by light.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _He was looking at me, staring, like he’d never seen me before. I grinned at him, shyly, and his face cracked into that lovely, disarming smile._
> 
> _“I like that,” I said. “That you call me that—‘old sport’—it feels…” I trailed off._
> 
> _Jay kept on smiling as we walked down the path from his door to the road. “Possessive? Endearing?”_
> 
> _“That too.” I tightened my grip on Jay’s arm as we started down the road. He wasn’t putting much weight on me, but it didn’t hurt to be prepared. “But I was going to say_ right _.”_

The rest of the week, we shared the couch from the start of the night. We lay still on one another’s arms like we thought we might be caught if we moved for anything more than soft, open-mouthed kisses.

By the time the calls stopped, Jay was petulant with cabin fever. He would have paced, had he the strength. He settled, instead, for reading the newspaper the butler brought in, and making catty remarks whenever he came across his own name, which was often.

For such a large city, New York was shockingly single-minded.

Summer was departing swiftly. I couldn’t have described why, even if pressed, but the season had emboldened us all somehow. What we had done, in those overbright days and warm, short nights, could not be repeated once the leaves had turned.

I could make this generalization from my own experiences, but I couldn’t imagine how much worse it was for Jay. This summer had undone him, in ways no one could have predicted. 

I could only hope that what he’d gained in turn was worth it.

(Daisy was gone. Jordan had told me as much during the brief time she called on the house, looking not for Jay, but for me. The Buchanans had packed up and gone, without a word, to Europe. She’d said it quietly, but I knew Jay had heard.)

After the third time Jay snapped at me for clearing my throat, I got up, grabbed his cane from the floor, and thrust it into his hand.

“Let’s go out, Jay,” I said, hoping he could infer the _before you bite my head off_ without my having to say it.

A week’s rest had done Jay good, but he still struggled getting to his feet. He’d eaten little, due to the painkillers, and had lost even more weight than he’d done in the hospital.

I looped my arm through his, so that he was supported on one side by the cane and the other by me. “We’ll walk over to my house,” I decided. “Rest there a while, and come back. You can use my bath, if you’d like.”

Jay nodded faintly. “Yes, that sounds agreeable, old sport.”

He was looking at me, _staring,_ like he’d never seen me before. I grinned at him, shyly, and his face cracked into that lovely, disarming smile.

“I like that,” I said. “That you call me that—‘old sport’—it feels…” I trailed off.

Jay kept on smiling as we walked down the path from his door to the road. “Possessive? Endearing?”

“That too.” I tightened my grip on Jay’s arm as we started down the road. He wasn’t putting much weight on me, but it didn’t hurt to be prepared. “But I was going to say _right._ ”

Jay turned to me, his eyes feverishly bright. “I wish I could kiss you,” he whispered, gripping my arm so tight I nearly lost feeling in it. “I wish I could kiss you right here, and at all my parties, and—”

He stopped both speaking and walking so abruptly that I was terrified for a moment that something was wrong. He stared past me, shuddering where he stood.

I said his name, and it seemed to break the trance.

“I wish it hadn’t taken all of this,” he said, wretchedly. His lips trembled, and I felt desperately lost.

In a moment of unmatched bravery, I glanced to each side before kissing him, firmly.

Jay trembled against my side the whole rest of the way to my house.

My Finn, irate at cleaning a house no one lived in, ushered us in with a string of curses in what I could only assume was her native Finnish. 

Trying to school my impatience, painfully aware of Jay’s increasing unsteadiness, I told her to make up some sandwiches and run a bath, and she set off dutifully, her complaints drying up.

She must have known, I decided later. I hope she was happy for us. I don’t know who else would be.

Jay was still shaking as we walked down the hallway to my bedroom, but he held himself upright. I shut the door behind us, and the change in him was immediate.

“Nick,” he said, his voice and his features crumbling with a grief I couldn’t fathom. “Nick, old sport—”

His voice failed him again, and he turned, dropping his cane to fall against me.

He couldn’t extract his left arm from my grip, not with the sling in the way, so he didn’t, pressing our folded arms between us in a way that must have hurt him, though if it did, he didn’t show any sign of it.

I kissed him, not knowing what else to do, and he clung to me as though any distance from me would pain him. 

It took several minutes of coaxing to get him to sit down on the bed, and by then he was as white as the sheets.

“Jay,” I said, once I’d finally unwound his fingers from my shirtfront. “Jay, what’s the matter?”

Jay took the handkerchief I offered him and swiped distractedly at his eyes. “After all that’s happened—” he began, then stopped and started again. “You know more about me than—”

He gave me a faltering smile, and I loved him deeply.

“Yes,” I said, seizing his hand. “Yes, after everything. Yes, here and now, _yes_ , who you are. Yes, in secret or yes, in front of everyone at one of your parties. Yes here, or in Europe, or wherever you please.”

I kissed him, as sweetly as I could with trembling lips. “If you’ve chosen me, really chosen me, and not settled for me now that Daisy’s gone, then yes.”

“I always wanted you,” Jay promised me. He shut his eyes, as if in pain, and opened them again. “Since we talked, I think. The first party you attended. I would have, too—” his eyes were widening, brightening. “That night, if you’d let me. If I hadn’t been so… if Daisy…”

I cut him off immediately. “Let’s not talk about Daisy.”

Jay frowned, but he acquiesced. After a quiet moment, he kissed me lightly. “Could I touch you, Nick?”

I kissed back, and thought about it.

“I’d rather you not,” I said. “But I’ll touch you, if you’d like.”

Another frown. They were much less elegant than his smiles. His eyebrows drew together, face crinkling up with whatever he was feeling.

“I’d rather no one, if you understand,” I explained. “Though I rather don’t understand it myself. I just don’t find it very appealing, the whole… business.”

Jay hummed in acknowledgement. He looked down at his lap, then up through his eyelashes. “But you wouldn’t mind…?”

I wouldn’t mind touching him. I very much minded _not_ touching him. I told him as much, and he laughed one of his bright laughs.

It took effort, getting him out of his clothes with one of his arms in a sling. I didn’t bother trying to navigate his shirt, just stripped off his pants and underwear.

It had been a long time since I’d been with a man. I wouldn’t have been too surprised if I’d made an utter fool of myself, but I managed not to.

In all honesty, it was easy. Touching Jay was like breathing after coming up from a long time underwater—instinctive and relieved, feeling overwhelmingly _right_.

Jay shuddered under my hands. He whispered my name in a desperate litany, head thrown back, fists curling and uncurling against his chest.

He was lovely. He was lovelier than I’d seen him in a long time—since the first smile that he gave me at the party, open and gorgeous. 

I closed my eyes when Jay came in my hand. I was afraid that looking at him would overwhelm me.

His hand rested on my jaw as he kissed me, but I still didn’t open my eyes.

“Nick?” Jay asked. “That was wonderful, old sport.”

I looked at him, and I couldn’t help telling him I loved him.

And he blessed me, once again, with his smile.


	3. Tell me we'll never get used to it.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“I want to know you,” I replied, pressing kisses down the line of Jay’s shin. I wrapped my hands around his ankles and lifted my head. “I want to know_ all _of you.”_
> 
>   
> _Jay tore his gaze away from mine, staring up at the ceiling. “You’re welcome to, Nick,” he said, his voice a low murmur that reached into my chest in a way I couldn’t fathom. “Please do.”_

The leaves changed, turning a deep gold cut through with red. Jay, who I’d feared would grow moodier, seemed to recover something of himself without the oppressive heat.

It might have helped, as well, that I kept him slaked—I honed my craft with hands and mouth, poring over Jay’s body the same way I studied the trade of stocks and bonds, and before that, when I was braver and more naive, writing.

I found, in my explorations, the cane’s original purpose; a gunshot wound had clipped Jay’s leg just below his knee, leaving a messy scar.

I laved my tongue over the texture of it, imagining which of the wartime skirmishes he’d described to me had resulted in it. He had been rewarded for some valor, no matter how few of his stories were true.

Jay wound one hand into my hair, fingers flinching a little from the texture of the gel in my hair. I resolved to stop using it—it had been a habit, once home from the war; a faint sensory reminder of the lack of need for a military cut.

“I’m afraid I haven’t much sensation there, old sport,” Jay said, a little breathlessly.

“I want to know you,” I replied, pressing kisses down the line of Jay’s shin. I wrapped my hands around his ankles and lifted my head. “I want to know _all_ of you.”

Jay tore his gaze away from mine, staring up at the ceiling. “You’re welcome to, Nick,” he said, his voice a low murmur that reached into my chest in a way I couldn’t fathom. “ _Please_ do.”

I kissed him everywhere I could think to lay my mouth, finding the places that made him laugh, made him sigh, made him gasp.

He laughed in shock when I took him in my mouth, but melted as easily as frost on a windowpane.

“Nick,” he whispered, so brokenly I nearly stopped to ensure he was all right. “Nick, old sport, I—”

His hands left my shoulders to lace his fingers with mine, desperation-tight, and perhaps it was those points of sudden contact that made him come. 

“I love you,” Jay sobbed, and I was too shaken to do anything but swallow and cling to his hands.

It took me hours to regain my voice enough to echo the sentiment, but I ensured by the way I held Jay that he knew before I said the words.

*

On a cooler day in September, we walked, arm in arm, to the bank.

Jay was strong enough that he considered leaving his cane behind, but I suggested he bring it along, if only for the additional excuse to be pressed so close to one another.

The secret of it, to be holding Jay for a reason not related to his physical weakness, gave me a thrill.

We’d spent nearly six weeks together, at that point, between our two houses, slowly consolidating our things into the few rooms we spent time in.

It wasn’t ever outright stated that we intended to leave, but the trip to the bank to see the state of our finances was as much of a conversation as we were going to manage to have, that far on.

As we were walking out of Jay’s house, where we’d been for the past few days, sorting through Jay’s perplexingly large collection of expensive shirts in the absence of anything better to do, I heard a shout from the doorway of my own house.

It was my Finn—I recognized her voice, could even pick out the syllables of her language’s generic cry for attention. But I still nearly knocked Jay off his feet trying to duck away from the noise and pivot towards it at once.

In silent understanding, Jay held me upright while the Finn made her way up the path from my house to the road. She thrust a letter into my hand, muttered what might have been an apology, and turned away again.

I clutched the letter between two fingers. My heart pounded in my ears, like the ocean through a seashell on both sides.

Tucking his cane under his arm, Jay plucked the letter from my hand.

“Is it from Daisy?” I asked, faintly. I couldn’t think who else would write to me.

Jay turned the letter over. I watched him out of the corner of my eye, too breathless to avert my gaze from a particular spot of gravel in the near distance.

“I do believe it’s from your father,” Jay said. “John Carraway?”

I looked at Jay, helplessly, disarmed to a shell of myself by the very presence of more people in the world than me and him.

“Let’s go to the bank,” I implored him. “Let’s finish what we meant to begin, first, and then we can discover exactly how disappointed in me my father is.”

There was a moment of readjusting as Jay tucked the letter away in one of his pockets and took up his cane again, and then we set off.

With my general inability to manage a car, and Jay’s own vehicle carefully vanished for his own safety by Wolfsheim and his men, we found it easier to simply walk and take the train. 

My accounts were mostly as expected, but Jay’s were rather startling.

“Crates of citrus fruit,” I teased him, pinching his thigh under the table. “Silk shirts from England.”

“I _know,_ old sport,” he replied, in that bright way of his that made my chest seize up. Then, quieter: “Where would you like to go?”

I thought of Yale, of Oxford. Of French villages battered by war. Of Minnesota, and what my father had to say in the letter in Jay’s pocket.

I led Jay out of the bank, into an alley, and took him in my arms.

“Where would you like to go?” I asked him, echoing back his usual insistence to never be an inconvenience. 

Jay shook against me. He shook, desperately, until I nearly had to carry all his weight.

“Jay, shh,” I told him, cupping his face in my hands, uncaring who saw the sweetness of it. “Jay. _Gatsby._ ”

Jay looked up at me, through the haze of his sudden loss. “Where are we meant to go? I hadn’t imagined a world—”

We were on our knees. I pressed Jay’s forehead to mine.

“But you always used to, Jay,” I reminded him, drawing from his stories, from the wide-open sky of his past’s future. “On Dan Cody’s yacht. As a child. You always believed there was more to you than what you were told.”

Jay’s fingers curled into my shirt—he had shrugged out of his sling to take hold of me. “I need someone,” he said, in a tearful rush, “I need _you_ to tell me what I am, old sport. I don’t _know_ who I am, or where to go—”

Finally, a question I could answer for him.

“You’re mine,” I said. “And we’ll go anywhere. Anywhere, Jay, but together.”

*

We traveled, but not for long. Jay, already bearing war wounds that had left him with the cane I had thought was merely a prop, was now often short of breath, and tired easily.

We went to his haunting grounds at Oxford, and he regaled me with variations on the story of why he had left in such a rush. 

I laughed, and never managed to force myself to tell him that he kept on lying. It didn’t quite matter what the truth was. The last time he had told me the truth, it had felt too much like ending things, and we had just begun.

In France, we found the towns that had been razed when we went through them during the war, to remind ourselves that all things were rebuilt in time.

In Venice, we drank ourselves silly, and kissed on a street corner.

London amused us, France comforted us, Venice enthralled us, but not enough to stay.

We found ourselves, instead, in America again, much poorer and only a little wiser, and rather tighter in our clothes, given our overindulgence in Venice.

We returned to New York, but only to ensure that Jay’s house and mine were properly sold to Meyer Wolfsheim, that enough funds to support us both went from the sale into Jay’s accounts, and to take the train from coast to coast.

I was trying to get Jay out of his jacket without jarring his shoulder when something crinkled in an inside pocket of his suit.

He drew it out, as if expecting some unfathomable terror, and found my father’s letter.

Laughing in shock at having forgotten it, I slit the top open with my pocketknife and read the first few sentences aloud, to gauge from Jay’s reactions if my father was providing wisdom or simply, as he would put it, ‘refraining from judgement despite his observations’.

My father had read a certain amount of “strange occurrences” in the papers near the area he knew me to be living, including rare mentions of my name, and hoped I hadn’t “somehow risked” myself.

Jay, despite being put out that I had ceased to touch him, laughed heartily. I allowed him that, though in truth I was worried. 

My parents weren’t the Buchanans, certainly, nor were they the Fays. But I would receive some measure of inheritance from them, provided they still found me worthy.

“Should we go all the way to California?” Jay asked, while I was worrying the edge of the letter to shreds. “Or stop in the Middle West?”

“I think we’ve both spent enough time in the middle,” I replied, setting the paper aside and going back to disrobing Jay with an artisan’s care. “Hollywood might suit us, don’t you think?”

Jay shut his eyes in bliss, that I felt utterly honored to have put there.

“Only one way to find out, old sport.”

I took his hands in mine and held tight, as though the world would fall from beneath us. If it did, I wanted to be with him when it went.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter titles from Richard Siken's _Scheherazade_. With thanks, as always, to Kelley for enabling me, Lucien for entertaining me, and AJ for watching the movie with me from midnight to three in the morning, and generally being a fantastic sounding board.


End file.
